The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

Fascism is one of those words that sounds like it belongs in the past, conjuring up, as it does, marching jack boots in the streets, charismatic demagogues like Italy’s Mussolini or Spain’s Franco and armed crackdowns on dissent and freedom of expression.

It is a term we are used to reading in histories about World War 2 — not in news stories from present day America.

And yet the word, and the dark reality behind it, is creeping into popular contemporary usage.

Radical activists on the left have never been hesitant to label their opponents with this “F word” whenever governments support laws that limit opposition or overdo national security or abuse human rights. Government paranoia turns critics paranoid.

One example: writer Naomi Wolf forecast fascism creeping into America during the Bush years accelerated by the erosion of democracy, writing:

“It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society.

I was contacted this morning by Bay Area National Anarchists founder Andrew Yeoman. He felt that I had unfairly maligned his group in my recent article on radical traditionalist website Alternative Right. I don’t really want to get into the specifics of our exchange, however, I would now like to present the videos I referenced (but did not post) in my previous article. The event they are protesting is the Folsom Street Fair, which is a leather / BDSM event, not explicitly a gay pride event.

I stand by my claim that harassment takes place on these videos and that the demonstration attempts to target homosexuals. Indeed, Folsom Street Fair is largely (if not predominantly) an event for the gay leather / BDSM community.

Welcome to a new feature on Red Star Times, right-wing blog watch. I am introducing this feature for the sake of keeping a close eye on right-wing blogs, ranging from hardline conservative to outright fascist. My first subject of study is Alternative Right, a particularly noxious website that brands itself as “radical traditionalist.” For those who aren’t familiar with the term, radical traditionalist is a term used by hipsters, goths and faux-erudite who espouse fascist ideology but want a term with more intellectual cache.

Radical traditionalist favorites include Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist. Associated (allegedly) political movements include Eurasianism, metapolitics, third positionism and national anarchism. Alternative right is an exemplar of radical traditionalism and fascism in as much as it begins with hatred of minorities, women and the working class and proceeds to construct a bizarre mish-mash of gobbledygook as “ideology” after the fact.… Read the rest

Much hubbub occurred over the weekend about Arizona SB1070. Curious to know your thoughts, there was a time where Arizona was the center of libertarianism in this country, and such a law there would have been unthinkable:

Last year the economy entered a free fall. Conditions that haven’t been approximated since the 1930s were the norm. It is time to take a cold, hard look at America as it exists at the beginning of 2010.

It is time to look at things in a way that goes beyond the surface, bullshit analysis of the corporate media. America and the world currently stand at a cross roads. We are in the eye of a perfect storm that combines the worst elements of 1914 and 1929.

Hey kids. Sorry I’ve been a little incommunicado as of late. I had to move Fort Black Sun Gazette and it was really time consuming. I’ve also ended my life as a jizz-mopper to be a full-time freelance writer. All in all, it’s going really well. But you aren’t here to hear about my personal life. You’re here to get information that gets you pissed. To welcome myself back to the site, I’d like to give you this morning’s nightmare roundup of news you can’t use. Read this and get pissed. Then take action.

One way to fight fascism is to get some historical perspective. Fascism is distinct from capitalism and socialism. It’s as silly for the left to say capitalists and fascists are the same, just as it ridiculous for the right to say that socialists and fascists are the same. Take a look at the people in the Nazi’s concentration camps – Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, Anarchists and Trade Unionists – not capitalists. The answer is organizing among the working class, paying special attention to the working poor, reaching out to the lower middle class who were some of the biggest early supporters of the fascists. I urge people to read stuff by people who were eyewitnesses to the rise of fascism like Daniel Guerin (an anarchist) and Leon Trotsky.

For decades the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been the subject of passionate debate. His critique of Western thought and technology has penetrated deeply into architecture, psychology and literary theory and inspired some of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century. Yet he was also a fervent Nazi.

Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”

First published in France in 2005, the book, “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,” calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech.

Some think fascism in America will resemble Nazi Germany, but I think it will it will look more like Fascist Italy. People picture skinheads and Klansmen, but in Italy it was different. Fascists used racist rhetoric, like Slavs were backwards and Africans were savages, but these were typical attitudes in Europe at the time. Institutionalized racism didn’t occur til 1938 when Mussolini under pressure from Hitler passed anti-Jewish laws. Italo Balbo the charismatic right hand of Benito protested this change. Hell, Mussolini even had a Jewish mistress. The fascists of today will look a lot like the very familiar, mostly white, working and middle class.